Ghost - The Lost of Mercy (1994)

   Ghost had to wait a lot for their first full-lenght album, which was the last one as well. The band formed in the late '80s and therefore their music included plenty of old school references.
   The most typical feature of the Eastern European extreme metal scene is that the technical and financial difficulities of album releases eased around the middle of the '90s, when death metal slowly faded away. And because of this late arrival these bands didn't get to wider attention even if they were able to produce great quality. The main scene changed a lot meanwhile, the genre exhausted, and the audience was looking for something new already. "The Lost of Mercy" is like a nice nostalgia album, the biggest names of the genre may come into mind as possible influences during listening these themes, such as Brutality, Morbid Angel, Obituary or Carcass, only to mention a few. The album starts rough and keeps that very intense profile for a while, but some groovy themes showing up with time, and short grinding parts are common too. It sounds like fan made album that tried to mix these influences and creating something unified from them. There is no lack of diversity and intensiveness, so "The Lost of Mercy" could be very enjoyable for the old school fans of the genre.